London Street Gangs: A modern history
Part Three: The Yardies
The
posses which spread overseas from Jamaica in the 1980’s had organisational
structures immediately distinguishable from any previous criminal enterprises.
Whilst the American Mafia, for example, is punctuated by strict family ties and
hierarchy, the posses were based on loose associations of like minded gangsters
with a common interest in doing business[ii].
There was rarely an overall don, a self-proclaimed leader potentially would run
the risk of being killed by their aspiring lieutenants. ‘In truth, rather than
conforming to a strict demarcation of responsibilities, it was routine for
posse members to perform various, often interchangeable tasks’ (Small 1995,
p.254). A posse structure was typically pyramid like with three tiers. At the
top are the dons, their role being the co-ordination, supply and distribution
of drugs, maintaining control, shaping development, and counting and laundering
proceeds of crime[iii].
The posses set up their activities in law-abiding Jamaican communities which
had established overseas, a welcoming environment where they ‘sought shelter,
protection and sustenance for their nefarious activities’ (Small 1995, p.255).
The upper tier limited its contact with the middle echelon, whose role was to
oversee the day-to-day management of the posse. They recruited workers, they
ensured street level dealers were supplied with drugs, and they collected the
proceeds. The bottom tiers, the workers, were the underclass, criminals and the
unemployed in need of income. Their job was the dirty work, selling drugs,
acting as look outs, working as mules and handlers of drugs and weapons. It was
also the most volatile tier where pushes to take over or maintain custom led to
serious violence and frenzied shooting matches. Workers recruited by posses in
Britain after the mid-1980s increasingly were Black British young men[iv].
‘Posse members were the men of a thousand faces. Thus the mythical overseers
might use a different name with every worker he came into contact with. So, in
the unlikely event that a dealer was apprehended and considered helping the
police with their enquiries, they would only be able to identify their putative
boss as ‘Longers’, ‘Stick’, ‘Billy’, or whatever...They may just know him by a
nickname or a street name. And that same person may have a different street
name in every area of the country that he goes...so identifying anyone of real
significance in the organisation is very, very difficult...the dons and
overseers learned the value of bogus identities, aliases and travel documents
in Jamaica’ (Small 1995, p.258-259).
The
first murder attributed to the Yardies in London was that of Nigerian drug
dealer Innocent Egbulefu in 1986. He was thrown out of a window; however, a
more common method of killing by the posse members was through gunplay. Between
1986 and 1988 there were five documented gun homicides perpetrated by Yardies
in London. In May 1986, Derek Walters was standing in the doorway of the Queens
Head pub in Stockwell, south London, when a blue Mercedes pulled up outside. A
man exited the vehicle, armed with a shotgun, and calmly walked up to
31-year-old DJ Walters and blasted him in the head with a shotgun at
point-blank range. It was alleged that Derek Walters was involved with coke
dealers[v].
Less than a week later a member of the door staff at Cynthia’s nightclub in
Acre Lane, near Brixton, was shot through the head as he tried to stop a group
of Jamaicans entering. It was thought that they were in search of rival coke
dealer who they believed was in the club[vi].
A year later, in May 1987, Michael ‘Mickey’ St George Williams, 31, from Stoke
Newington was found by a passer-by still breathing but slumped over the steering
wheel after his car, a dark blue Porsche, crashed into a tree in Stamford Hill.
A post mortem examination revealed that he had died from gunshot wounds to the upper
torso. Scotland Yard dismissed speculation that he was killed in a gangland
vendetta[vii].
However, they were off the mark. Customers at the Bronx club in Stoke Newington
recalled seeing Mickey arguing about the spoils of an armed robbery, he had
wanted to invest it in cocaine whilst Leroy ‘Fitz’ Hughes, a reggae guitarist,
and Norman ‘Bicycle’ Campbell, a paranoid psychotic who had recently been
released from Park Lane security hospital in Liverpool, wanted their share. The
amount was rumoured to be in the region of £100,000, gained from a jewellery
heist[viii]
[ix].
When Williams left the club that evening he was shot dead, Bicycle blasted him
with a shotgun. Both Bicycle and Fitz were convicted of murder in January 1988.
Just a few months later a cousin of Norman ‘Bicycle’ Campbell, Barron
‘Dangermouse’ Campbell and an accomplice shot rival coke dealer Alwyn ‘Shankie’
Alfred of Chiswick in the head at the Priory Centre in South Acton, west
London. The accomplice was Trevor ‘Sammy Dread’ Miller, he was wanted for three
political murders in Jamaica before coming to England in January 1987. The
court heard how Sammy Dread was smiling as he blasted Shankie’s head away with
a shotgun[x]. He
would be deported on completion of his sentence. The fifth murder was that of
Rohan ‘Yardie Ron’ Barrington Barnet in August 1988, a successful drug dealer
who specialised in cannabis and cocaine.
When
the posses set up shop their first phase begins with a trusted ‘spy’ being
dispatched to stake out potential locations. Their mission would be to report
back to the don with information on the strength of the host drug dealing
organisation, drug users’ drugs of choice, suitable retail outlets and so on.
If these diverse factors measured up soldiers would move in to seize the new
territory[xi].
How this worked across London varied. In some areas posse members worked with
British born criminals, including those of Caribbean descent, in other areas
they moved into uncontested territory, and inevitably areas where they were
unwelcome became urban battlefields. Barrington Foster, who was born in
Britain, recalls the friction with Jamaican arrivals back in the early 1980’s.
"I mixed with them, but I didn’t do crimes with them. They used to think they
could come and bully the British-born. We’d say, “Don’t come that shit with
us”. When they’d come to parties for instance, they’d come up to you and say
buy me a drink. One time I was in the bathroom in a club in Balham, building a
spliff when one of these Yardies came in with his mate, and he said, “You might
as well get the rest out, because we’re taking it off you, English boy!” I
said, “OK, I’ll go and get it”, so I went into the cubicle, pulled out my gun
and came back and said, “Who the fuck are you saying ‘English boy’?” They
started shitting themselves. I said: “This is England. It ain’t Jamaica”. ‘We
had that rivalry where that first wave of Yardies coming over, they thought
that they could bully us and tax us. A lot of the English or British-born did
cave in – they found it quite difficult – but we weren’t standing for it. So a
lot of the times I had to draw my gun and I’ll be quite honest, I would have
used it because they were bullies, and they were trying to take from us. If
they’d heard we’d been on a job, they tried to tax us. At that time, they
didn’t have the numbers so much. So you’d only have two together and they’d be
frightened. I’d tell them: “I can go anywhere in south-west London and get you
taken care of. I can go east London and get you taken care of. These guns we’ve
got, they come from white men in north London, so if you fuck about, people
from another race will hit you”. These Yardies tried to scare you with fear of
their mouth, but there were a few of us who’d say this is our country. We can
get things you can’t get[xii]." Fosters grandparents were Jamaican, having come to London in the 1950’s,
settling in Balham. Another person who recalls the relationship between Yardies
and the British born youths was Tony Miller, known then as Younger T. "When the
Yardies came over I had to learn a new way of culture, and a way of surviving
on the street. They became the name brand and all the guys in Brixton started
to try and speak like the Yardies. Then there was like a war between the young
British boys and the Yardies. I was unfortunately involved in one incident on
Railton Road and nearly lost my life because he tried to rob me, but I came
back with my brother and battered him – a Jamaican. This guy tried to rob me.
He asked for a cigarette. I said “I ain’t got one”. He said he’d cut me all
over. I went and found him later in a gambling club, went downstairs and
battered him with a hammer. I didn’t see myself as having an aggressive or
violent nature, I saw myself as a thief. Eventually I started building
relationships with some of the Yardie guys and I became close with them in
terms of drugs, and I built up a career. From sixteen or seventeen I got into
cocaine and became a dealer, and moved from burglaries and street crime and
became a pick-pocketer. The money I got from pick-pocketing, I spent on
cocaine, and it was a vicious circle. With the cocaine I was mixing with people
all over London. I had exclusive clients – not Brixtonians. They were
businessmen in the city and in big corporate organisations[xiii]."
In
September 1986, four drug couriers were arrested at Gatwick airport, uncovering
an international drugs network between London and Jamaica. West Indian Tailor
Parnell Perkins, also known as Bird, was said to have earned a fortune running
the network and organising teams of young female couriers to bring drugs into
Britain concealed in specially made girdles. Perkins lived a ‘flash’ lifestyle
with expensive jewellery and cars, including a £19,000 Mercedes and £9,000 Ford
Escort XR3i. He also owned two houses in Jamaica and had numerous bank accounts
where over £250,000 had been deposited. There was no doubt that Perkins was the
ring leader and organiser of the network, which he co-ordinated from a flat in
Debden House on the Broadwater Farm Estate. Perkins, who was described as
intelligent and articulate, was quite unscrupulous in his use of women
throughout the network who fell under his spell. No fewer than six women formed
part of the upper and middle tiers of Perkins’ network. Through his contacts,
Perkins arranged the importation of 126 kilos of cannabis into Britain,
estimated then at a value of £468,000. His common-law wife and her mother, who
were from Hornsey, were in control of the finances, playing banker to Perkins.
His common-law-wife, who was a former clerical assistant with the Inland
Revenue, held four bank accounts which were used to keep proceeds from the
conspiracy whilst also being responsible for arranging the laundering of money
through various transactions and deposits. Described as the ‘Banker’, she was a
young mother of three children who played an important role, but prior to
meeting Perkins she’d led a blameless life. It seemed she reluctantly became
involved when the conspiracy crept up on her and overwhelmed her. Her own
mother played the role of ‘banking messenger’. When her home on the Campsbourne
Estate was searched officers found banknote wrappers and details of bank and
building society accounts. The open and naive lady had become involved through
her own daughter.
Next
in line were Perkins’ ‘partners’ who were based in Kingston, Jamaica. They were
known as Blacker Dush and Audrey Brown. Their role was to recruit pretty young
women to act as drug mules and to arrange for the drugs to be collected and
concealed on them before leaving Kingston. Two more women from north London, a
31-year-old market street trader from Upper Edmonton and her 28-year-old unemployed
sister from Lower Edmonton, were responsible for laundering and storing
proceeds, and it is assumed collecting the couriers on their arrival into
Britain. Perkins was also in a relationship with the elder north London sister
who thought that she was pregnant by him. Each of these women had direct
contact with the lower echelon, who knew Parnell Perkins only as ‘Bird’. In
Jamaica, the young girls recruited by Dush and Brown were supplied with drugs,
cannabis, which was collected from a coffee shop in Kingston. Specially
designed girdles, under garments around the lower torso, were used to conceal
the drugs. The couriers, or mules, then covered themselves in distinctive
dresses that would help identify them at the other end of their journey. They
would travel from Kingston airport through Miami and Gatwick London in transit
to Brussels. When the couriers arrived to Brussels they were met by a new pair
of couriers, spotting the dresses provided by the gang, and exchanged the
girdles in the ladies lavatory. The couriers were given up to £800 spending
money, those who arrived in Britain were said to have been paid between
£2-3,000 in their hotels. Perkins and his common-law wife were thought to be responsible
for the wholesale of drugs to mid-level dealers in north London, not directly
connected with the network. The money obtained from the sale of cannabis in
Britain, the networks immense assets, was stored in Selfridges safety deposit
boxes by the two north London sisters. The final member of the network of note
was a young illegal immigrant from Jamaica. He had entered Britain having made
a false passport application and was entrusted to store cannabis at his home.
It is thought that drugs were divided and distributed from here after a raid
later uncovered scales, two automatic pistols, a homemade silencer and 27
rounds of ammunition.
Customs
and Excise led the investigation which had rumbled Parnell Perkins network,
believing them to have made at least 14 successful runs from Jamaica. During
the course of the investigation they traced buyers of the airline tickets, checked
hotel records and even traced telephone calls made from hotels in Brussels to
the flat in Debden House, Broadwater Farm. They believed that Perkins made up
to £500,000 from his activities. In 1986, the year in which Perkins’ network
was uncovered, the government passed the Drugs Trafficking Offences Act (1986).
It was the first act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which specifically
dealt with the laundered proceeds of drug trafficking, coming into effect on 1
January 1987. A team of 35 Customs and Excise officers was organised to
coincide with the introduction of the new powers, their remit to track down the
assets of convicted drug traffickers to enable courts to make confiscation
orders. The customs team included trained financial intelligence officers, all
of whom were experts in banking and accounting procedures. The new act enabled
them to gain access to bank accounts and Inland Revenue files, as well as the
ability to seek seizure orders on properties, cars and other possessions[xiv].
On 22 January 1988 Perkins was jailed for 12 years whilst Judge Kenneth Cooke,
sitting at Southwark Crown Court, examined the finances of the network with a
view to making the biggest sequestration order applied for by Customs since the
Drugs Trafficking Offences Act came into force. Perkins, who had bank accounts
in Jamaica, Nova Scotia and the United Kingdom was ordered to forfeit a then
record £330,000 in confiscated profits, seized under the newly created
confiscation of assets law. His common-law wife was jailed for seven years and
also ordered to forfeit £57,000, plus her Ford Escort XR3i and £3,000 from her
bank accounts. The mother-in-law was jailed for two years and the two north
London sisters were given terms of between 12 and 18 months, all for their
involvement in the laundering of drugs money. The two-and-a-half month trial
cost the tax payer £45,000, minimal in comparison to the proceeds later
recovered and sent to the treasury. It’s unknown what connection Perkins
organisation may have had with the ‘Broadwater Farm Posse’, and whether or not
the recipients of the smuggled marijuana, or ‘workers’, were local youth on the
estate. With its unwanted reputation as lawless, resulting from the riots,
policing with unnecessary force and racial discrimination of non-white
residents became a common complaint of those trying to rebuild the Farm. Whilst
the community activists waged their legitimate battles, running parallel was
the continuation of criminal gang activity from a new generation that were
known as the ‘Totten’am Boys’ or the ‘Frontliners’, composed of both British
and non-British born youths. Whilst the Frontliners were in their infancy and growing,
officials from the police and the Home Office were busy drawing up plans to
deport Jamaican musician ‘Ranking Dread’
In 1986
Ranking Dread became Scotland Yard’s number one suspect in the murder of
Nigerian drug dealer Innocent Egbulefu who was thrown out of the window of a
high-rise flat in Islington, eight floors at a height of ninety feet. It’s
thought that Egbulefu double-crossed Ranking Dread and his associates by
selling them a consignment of marijuana concocted of herbs and tea leaves.
Returning shortly after examining their fake product, the men forced their way
back into the flat, during which time Egbulefu ended up plunging to his death.
The events had happened so quickly that Egbulefu was still holding the remote
control unit for his television set[xxi].
In May 1988 investigative television series, The Cook Report, labelled Ranking Dread as the head of Shower Posse
operations in the United Kingdom in their exposé of the Yardies. Programme
presenter Roger Cook singled out Ranking Dread as a Jamaican Mafia-like master
villain. Cook intercepted him walking down a busy London street, but when these
accusations were put to the man himself he coolly denied them without even
breaking his stride. Ranking Dread’s street reputation also did not go
unchallenged and at least one-attempt at taking over his business interests was
documented whereby a British born teen attacked him with a machete in a London
shebeen. He had a number of very close scrapes, some people putting his escapes
down to his belief in Obeah, a folk magic and religious practice in the West
Indies derived from West Africa. Some gang members believe that occult rituals
can protect them in gang fights by cursing their rivals, and even protect
themselves from bullets. It seems though that one thing they cannot protect
against is law enforcement. At 5.38AM on 14 April 1988 police officers raided a
shebeen at 19a Clapton Way, east London. The derelict property owned by Hackney
Council had become a focal point for serious and organised crime, particularly
the trafficking of cocaine. Following several weeks’ surveillance a team of
thirty-two officers stormed the address and arrested twenty suspects including
Rankin Dread. As well as the arrest police recovered several weapons including
a machete. Small quantities of cannabis and cocaine were discovered, however,
there were no firearms or crack[xxii].
Under the name of Errol Codling, Ranking Dread was allowed bail by magistrates
at Highbury, having been accused of possessing cocaine and cannabis with intent
to supply. Three accomplices from Stoke Newington, Penge and Balham were bailed
on similar charges[xxiii].
A few months after the raid in east London a close friend of Ranking Dread was
killed in an early morning shoot-out in Harlesden, north-west London. Rohan
‘Yardie Ron’ Barrington Barnet, 26, took two bullets to the chest as ten rounds
were discharged. Yardie Ron fired at two of his rivals, both of whom were
wounded, before he was bundled into a vehicle and taken to St Charles Hospital
in Notting Hill, west London, where he died. At the scene Detectives recovered
spent shells from three high-calibre firearms including a 9mm. The scene
displayed all the hallmarks of a ‘Yardie’ incident, the highly public exhibition
of violence failed to turn up any witnesses and police attributed the killing
to a drugs feud[xxiv].
On 8 November 1988 a decision was made not to try Ranking Dread, 31, in Britain
for drugs charges. Instead Home Office officials decided to deport him and he
was flown to Jamaica with two detectives from Scotland Yard[xxv].
Shortly after being deported from Britain Ranking Dread fled to Toronto, in
July 1989, where he went on to serve a 12-month sentence for assaulting a
police officer. He was again deported back to Jamaica in November 1992 after
his attempts at gaining refugee status were unsuccessful, passing away in a
Jamaican prison four years later.
Through
the 18-months prior to Ranking Dread’s arrest police had assembled the ‘Yardie
Squad’, otherwise known as Operation Lucy which was designed as an intelligence
gathering unit, and meant basically targeting anybody who was associated with
Jamaican criminals. The objective of Operation Lucy was to prevent Yardies
making further inroads within criminal networks in Greater London. The result
of the database was constructing information on a drug distribution set-up
involving 200 suspected criminals, spanning the United Kingdom, predominantly
in the major urban areas of London, Birmingham and Manchester (Small 1995). Furthermore,
it had catalogued 3,000 incidents and resulted in the deportation of fifty
illegal immigrants (Thompson 1995). Shortly after Ranking Dread’s arrest the
unit disbanded. A succession of reasons were put forward as to why including,
in no particular order, political incorrectness and even racism for having an
operation targeting only Black criminals; the expense of the operation could
not be justified; it was counter-productive in progressing ‘community
policing’; or that the Yardie problem had been brought under control (Thompson
1995; Small 1995). It was in fact replaced in response to a more pressing
social menace: crack-cocaine. Together police and customs launched a national
joint taskforce to deal with crack, the cocaine derived drug, on 1 December
1989. The new unit was designated initially for a period of six months under
the command of Douglas Tweddle, a senior Customs drugs investigator. Working in
collaboration with Chief Superintendent Derek Todd, head of Scotland Yard drug
squad, the unit was aimed at those criminals involved in the trafficking of
cocaine. There had been 300 kilograms of cocaine seized in the preceding
12-months by Customs, although at the time little intelligence was available
which could connect traffickers with the street distribution level. The street
level dealers would be targeted through focussing on couriers of smaller
amounts, typically young women, who smuggled cocaine wrapped in condom packages
in their digestive tracts. Seperately CICU, the Crack Intelligence
Co-ordinating Unit was set up within the Metropolitan Police after the
disbanding of Operation Lucy, although it is unclear how this sat within the
governance of the joint work with Customs. According to Chief Supt Todd, the
manufacture of crack-cocaine was increasing - there had been 87 seizures
throughout England between January and October 1989[xxvi].
Cocaine
coming into Britain primarily originated from Latin America, with most cocaine
grown and processed in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, travelling via the Caribbean
and the United States and also via the Iberian Peninsula. Later routes came to
exist via West African nations, notably Nigeria, and finally the Netherlands. The
crack epidemic that hit the United States from the late 1980’s did not
materialise to the same extent in the United Kingdom. Perhaps it is the closer
proximity of the United States to source countries? In the United Kingdom
another drugs menace, heroin, was much more prevalent – in weight terms
seizures were seven times greater for heroin than for cocaine. Heroin coming
into Britain in the 1980’s was largely thought to be via those of ‘South Asian’[xxvii]
and Chinese heritage, the former of which collectively made up Britain’s
largest ethnic minority. The two main heroin producing regions in the world
border ‘South Asia’ (The Golden Crescent
– Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan) and China (The Golden Triangle – Burma, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam). Another route,
which would later dominate in the United Kingdom, was through Turkey and the
Balkans region.
Click Here for Part Four: Operation Shampoo
[i] Davis, S. &
Greig, G. (1987) ‘Spectrum: Yardies spark new gangster fear in Britain’, The Sunday Times, 25 October.
[ii] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies.
London: Warner Books.
[iii] ibid
[iv] ibid
[v] Thompson, T. (1995). Gangland Britain. London: Hodder &
Stoughton.
[vi] ibid
[vii] Sapsted, D. (1987)
‘Driver in crash had been shot’, The
Times, 25 May.
[viii] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies.
London: Warner Books.
[ix] Thompson, T. (1995). Gangland Britain. London: Hodder &
Stoughton.
[x] Court Reporter (1989)
‘Yardie jailed for life; Trevor Miller’, The
Times, 9 May.
[xi]
Small, G.
(1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the
Yardies. London: Warner Books.
[xii] McLagan, G. (2005). Guns and Gangs: The inside story of the war
on our streets. London: Allison & Busby. P.25-26.
[xiii]
Ibid p.30.
[xiv] Evans, M. (1986)
‘Impact of new legislation on assets of convicted drug traffickers’, The Times, 17 October.
[xv] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies.
London: Warner Books.
[xvi] Barrow, S. &
Dalton, P. (2003). The Rough Guide to
Reggae, 3rd Edition, p. 274, Rough Guides.
[xvii]
Moskowitz, D.V.
(2006). Caribbean Music: An Encyclopedia
of Reggae, Mento, Ska, Rock Steady, and Dancehall, p.246, Greenwood Press.
[xviii] Johnson, A. &
Murtagh, P. (1988) ‘Shanty town gangs that Met wants to nip in the bud’, The
Guardian, 25 February.
[xix] Thompson, T. (1995). Gangland Britain. London: Hodder &
Stoughton.
[xx] ibid
[xxi] ibid
[xxii] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies.
London: Warner Books.
[xxiii] Court Reporter (1988)
‘Four on drug charges’, The Times, 16
April.
[xxiv] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies.
London: Warner Books.
[xxv] Sharrock, D. (1988)
‘Yardie leader sent to Jamaica’, The
Guardian, 9 November.
[xxvi] Rose, D. (1989) ‘New
task force to tackle crack’, The Guardian,
2 December.
[xxvii] A government term
used to define those of Bengali, Indian and Pakistani origin
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